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Posted on 03/09/2016 6:07:00 PM PST by MtnClimber
When Max Born addressed the South Indian Science Association in November 1935, it was a time of great uncertainty in his life. The Nazi Party had already suspended the renowned quantum mechanics physicist's position at the University of Gottingen in 1933. He had been invited to teach at Cambridge, but it was temporary. Then, the Party terminated his tenure at Gottingen in the summer of 1935. Born took up an offer to work with C. V. Raman and his students for six months at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. While there, he found that his family had lost its German citizenship rights. He was stateless and without a permanent home. And then, there was this uncertainty about two numbers. The scientific world had been coming to terms with two numbers that had emerged after a series of discoveries and theories in the previous four decades. They were unchanging and they had no units. One, the fine structure constant, defined the strength of interactions between fundamental particles and light. It is expressed as 1/137. The other, mu, related the mass of a proton to an electron. Born was after a unifying theory to relate all the fundamental forces of nature. He also wanted a theory that would explain where these constants came from. Something, he said, to “explain the existence of the heavy, and light elementary particles and their definite mass quotient 1840." It might seem a little bizarre that Born worried about a couple of constants. The sciences are full of constants—one defines the speed of light, another quantifies the pull of gravity, and so on......... But the weird thing about such constants is that there is no theory to explain their existence.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.scientificamerican.com ...
The beauty of the “many universes” theory, as I understand it, is that you can’t observe any of the others (absent wormholes or some such unproven business), so if you want to invoke them you pretty much have to just accept them. Or in other words you have to have faith to avoid Faith.
There's the rub. If change is the one constant, wouldn't that be subject to change, too?
This partly explains the continues measurements of laser light bounced and returned from the Apollo laser reflector arrays, along with the two (one recently recovered thanks to the LRO lunar orbiter) Soviet French-built arrays and a fifth in orbit since 2009 attached to the LRO itself.
Before the recovery of the 'lost' Lunokhod array together with the deployment of the LRO, photon counts reflected back to Earth had reached a peak granularity in measuring the Earth-Moon distance down to within 3 mm, putting a fine enough point for most of us on a figure averaging 238,857 miles.
It's was hoped adding the lost array and the LRO array would improve on that figure, along with confirmation of the Moon's formally illusive "center," and it's moment of inertia. The finer point, so I've been informed by people way over my pay-grade, would add further certainty to, so-called "locality," adding much to our astonishment (as the author honestly hints) in discovering these "constants" are universal, not just a characteristic of the neighborhood.
For my own paygrade, it adds to my conclusion that says if all we received from the most recent aborted Moon program was the LRO, it has proved very worthwhile, and for many more less obscure achievements.
Excellent analysis! Thank you. Everything you posted sounds exactly reasonable!
Thank you for your #28. Very interesting.
How can we get Hillary to take a ‘ride’ on the rocket ship you describe? lol
lol
The great paradox of Creation: The only constant is change.
Nature abhors consistency.
Until you get to the First Cause or the Unmoved Mover.
Bookmark.
I am SO going to add that to my repertoire.
What evidence have you that universal constants aren’t?
If the speed of light changes, we’d have observed the effects by now.
The programmer’s lament - “Constants aren’t and Variables won’t”.
Pi changes in a large gravitational field ... because spacetime is warped.
Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter in a flat Euclidean space. If the space is curved pi no longer satisfies the equation.
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